How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [92]
From my increasingly stressful vacation spot on Orcas Island, I got ahold of the committee member with whom I had originally spoken, who was in Prague to present the committee report in the next day or two. I told him I thought the committee recommendation was a mess. How could Charon be a planet? How could it say there were only twelve round things? It made no sense.
He calmly explained the committee’s reasoning and said that he would make sure that in the press release and the press conference it would be very clear that many, many more objects were on the way to being included as planets. And, he mentioned again, he had already talked to many of the astronomers in Prague, and there was nearly universal support for the new definition.
There was clearly nothing I could do. I was on a remote island on the wrong continent; it was impossible for me to have any influence over what was happening in Prague. And in Prague the very next day, they were going to declare that I was one of only seven people in human history who had ever discovered a new planet in the solar system. Who was I to complain?
That night, long after Lilah was asleep and Diane had crawled into bed, I walked (limped, really, but I was now in a walking cast, at least) down to the rocky shore. I could see north across the strait to the islands off the coast of Canada. I could see the deep twilight still casting its final red rays on one of the triangular volcanic peaks over toward the mainland. I turned around to look back at the island, back to the south, but my view of the southern sky was blocked by madrone trees growing close to the water. Farther down the beach, some rocks jutted out into the strait; I’d have a view from there. I hobbled down to the rocks and slowly made my way out to the point. From here I could see the unobstructed southern sky. Low to the south, masquerading as the brightest star around, was Jupiter, undisputed king of the planets.
I sat on the rock and watched the sky and looked at Jupiter. Who was it who first noticed that Jupiter moves? You can sit and stare at it all night long and not tell a thing. You can come back the next night, and unless you’re looking very, very closely, you will still probably not notice anything different. But Jupiter moves. It’s a wanderer. A planet.
I know we’re past the point that when people say the word planet they mean an object that wanders across the sky. In fact, we’re so far past that point that most people never even realize that the planets really are up there wandering night after night. Planets are, to most people these days, pictures from spacecraft, drawings on a lunch box, models in a museum. Meanings can change. After tonight the word planet would change again, adding to the pantheon a little point of light moving through the sky that almost no one other than I had even seen. But it was real enough to me. At any point, day or night, winter or summer, if you walked up to me unannounced and said, “Quick! Where is Xena?” I could point an outstretched finger somewhere in space and locate it, with an error of about a hand’s width. If you asked me, “How big is Xena?” I would point at the moon and say, “Imagine a frosty world about half that size.” If you asked me what it would be like to walk on the surface of Xena, I would ask you to image walking on a frozen lake in the dark of the new moon. That was Xena. My tiny, frozen, nearly invisibly lovely planet. I looked off to the east, where Xena was just about to rise above Mount Constitution, and thought: So be it. I was ready for the next day.
I stared back at Jupiter, wishing I had thought to bring along binoculars so that I could pick out its miniature solar system of icy moons circling it. I tried to pretend I could tell that Jupiter was moving across the sky. The earth rotated. The stars moved toward the west.
I couldn’t accept it.
The solar system does not consist of twelve planets and then everything else. That is simply